In, “BLACKsummersnight,” his 4th studio album, Maxwell scraps every single construct that has made him popular. The warm, afro coifed R&B god that could have passed for a fashion model is gone, replaced by a clean cut, moody man with a serious case of the thirty somethings. In place of the smooth, up tempo funk that seemed ready made for urban coffee houses is a darker sound; more attuned to low chords and minor keys; […]
And now there is only the music. There is no bleached, living corpse to ridicule, no mutilated goblin to speculate on; no daemonic, yet tortured soul to gossip over for years and years on end. There is nothing left but the beauty, the arresting, transcendent beauty that came out of him at his very best; a beauty as clear, yet unexplainable as December or June. Oh, people will talk still about the madness of the […]
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1) What’s the best Prince album and why?
At his best, Prince is big, messy, Whitmanesque in his ambitions and attempts to encompass the entire vocabulary of black music into 3-4 minute increments. His best albums aren’t mystifyingly perfect like Stevie Wonder’s string of classics; nor do they have the sweet, organic, arresting playability […]